Thailand is losing the war on dissent, thanks to user notifications and HTTPS

From the Boing Boing Shop

Follow Us

Thailand's insane lese majeste laws make it radioactively illegal to criticize the royal family, reflecting a profound insecurity about the legitimacy of the ruling elites there that can only be satisfied through blanket censorship orders whenever one of the royals does something ridiculous, cruel or both (this happens a lot).

The latest scandal is more ridiculous than cruel: a video of the king of Thailand cruising a mall in Munich in a hilarious crop-top. But the aftermath was cruel enough: a series of overbroad censorship orders targeting both independent Thai websites and social media services like Facebook.

Here's where it all gets interesting. Facebook -- and its rivals -- have opened themselves to censorship by opening offices in basket-case states like Thailand and Russia, putting their employees in reach of those nations' torturing, corrupt justice systems. But they've also implemented HTTPS, which encrypts connections to their services, making it much harder (and often impossible) for law enforcement and spies to determine which pages their citizens are visiting, even under systems of extensive surveillance; and they've also implemented "user notification" systems that let users know when governments have ordered them to censor some resources and assets within national borders.

The effect of this is fascinating: when someone in Thailand gets a link to a video that the royals don't want seen, they are notified that they're not allowed to look at it. But there are lots of copies of this video that the government hasn't yet found and subjected to censorship orders, so a quick search is all it takes to find a mirror on Facebook (or another social network) and users can watch these mirrored copies with impunity because HTTPS makes it impossible for the police to know which Facebook pages they're looking at.

This has wide implications for other repressive states attempting to control the spread of dissident information in their national borders (for example, the promise by Theresa May to comprehensively censor the UK internet). To make this work, states will need to suppress working encryption (some former Soviet states in the Caucuses make it a crime to use a browser unless it has a domestically issued certificate that allows spies to launch man-in-the-middle attacks on HTTPS and see all private communications, though this will be harder and harder to implement, thanks to Certificate Transparency).

HTTPS and user notification systems massively raise the political and technological costs of censorship, but there are countermeasures states can deploy. At best, these technological fixes can give us the breathing room to organize and effect political changes that make them less necessary -- while using commercial pressure to get companies to pull out of repressive states where political change is slow (imagine if Facebook had a big office and lots of execs in Iran, and counted on the country for appreciable revenues -- it would be nearly impossible to get the company to buck the regime).

In an ideal world, timely and informative user notice can help power the Streisand effect: that is, the dynamic in which attempts to suppress information actually backfire and draw more attention to it than ever before. (And that’s certainly what’s happening with the video of the King, which has garnered countless international media headlines.) With details, users are in a better position to appeal to Facebook directly as well as draw public attention to government targeting and censorship, ultimately making this kind of censorship a self-defeating exercise for the government.

In an HTTP environment where governments can passively spy on and filter Internet content, individual pages could disappear behind obscure and misleading error messages. Moving to an increasingly HTTPS-secured world means that if social media companies are transparent about the pressure they face, we may gain some visibility into government censorship. However, if they comply without informing creators or readers of blocked content, we could find ourselves in a much worse situation. Without transparency, tech giants could misuse their power not only to silence vulnerable speakers, but also to obscure how that censorship takes place—and who demanded it.

The employee uprising over Google's secret "Project Dragonfly -- a plan to release a censored, surveilling search engine for use in China -- has reportedly attained its goals: some of the engineers on the covert team Project Dragonfly team have been re-tasked to other projects, and the remainder have been denied access to the critical […]

The fight against surveillance capitalism and mass state surveillance has reached a tipping point, the peak-indifference moment, when new privacy advocates are self-radicalizing as they witness firsthand the undeniable risks of overcollection, over-retention, and secret manipulation of personal data.

In a deeply researched longread, New York Times investigative reporters Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe document in fine detail the role played by the ubiquitous McKinsey and Company in legitimizing, coordinating, and supercharging the world's most notorious human-rights-abusing regimes, from Saudi Arabia to China to Russia.

For the true audio enthusiast, there’s a lot of difference between putting on some songs “for background music” and a true listening experience. For the latter, there’s nothing like a pair of sturdy headphones and the powerful speakers that come with them. And the wireless variety doesn’t get much more powerful than the TREBLAB Z2 […]

Digital or analog, there’s a path of least resistance for any project. Finding that path is what the Agile methodology is all about, which is why proficiency in it is a must for any project management position – and the paycheck that comes with it. And the quickest path to learning Agile? The Agile Project […]

Everybody’s flown a paper airplane. But what if you could fly on a paper airplane? Until we invent shrink-ray technology, the PowerUp X FPV Video Paper Airplane Kit will have to do – but it’s as fun as that sounds and more. The original version of this creative toy added drone tech to the old, […]